A special note to the above: If the writer is a socially privileged person—particularly a White or a male or both—his imagination may have to make an intense and conscious effort to realize that people who don’t share his privileged status may read his work and will not share with him many attitudes and opinions that he has been allowed to believe

Mr. Hudson’s summary of the material is elegant, and his interpretation of it is, I take it, Freudian. Dreamwork is rationalization, therefore it is falsification: a cover-up. The mind is an endless Watergate. Some primitive “reality” or “truth” is forever being distorted, lied about, tidied up. But what if we have no means of access to this truth

No house worth living in has for its cornerstone the hunger of those who built it.

Abstractions about right and wrong, whether they are as old as Thou Shalt Not Kill or as modern as Do Your Own Thing, very often serve only to confuse and weaken genuine moral decision.

Secondhand experience breaks down a block from the car lot.

Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn.

When we look at what we can’t see, what we do see is the stuff inside our heads. Our thoughts and our dreams, the good ones and the bad ones. And it seems to me that when science fiction is really doing its job that’s exactly what it’s dealing with. Not “the future.”

Even without identifying narration with falsification, one must admit that a vast amount of our life narration is fictional—how much, we cannot tell.

He is not my wife; but he brought to marriage an assumption of mutual aid as its daily basis, and on that basis you can get a lot of work done.